Late-Life Love

by Susan Gubar

  It was time to get the car, pick up Don at the front of Emeriti House, and do our chores. The wind colder now, the sky grayer, the drizzle heavier made me kvetch on the way: we should have applied for a disabled parking permit; we would never be able to find a space close enough to the courthouse in the Beaux Arts building at the center of town. Because of the new, expensive meters, though, we did manage to park in front of King Dough, near a tree hugged by colorful knitting and across from a courthouse entrance without steps.

  Huddled in our coats, buffeted by the wind, we traipsed across the street and into the marbled lobby with its high, glassed-in dome over which a copper fish serves as an ornament. Don knew exactly where to find the elevator to the second-floor treasurer’s office. Behind a long counter, a staffer looked up and then down at the envelope Don placed before her.

  “We can’t figure out why our house taxes were returned to us and now we’ll have to pay a penalty,” I explained.

  She looked at the envelope, opened it to see the check, closed it again, and smiled.

  “There’s no postage,” she said, tapping the upper right corner like we lived on some other planet, though it was kind of her, I thought, not to say, “Duh, you forgot to put on a stamp.”

  Don and I gawked and then avoided looking at each other, as his cane colluded by clattering onto the floor.

  “No problem, the date of the check proves it was written before the deadline; we can waive the penalty.”

  On the way home—and while I stopped at Carrol’s to return both copies of “Silver Threads among the Gold”—I kept on thinking of our vulnerability in the world. It was Don who had forgotten to put a stamp on the envelope, but I had forgotten about the taxes altogether. Nor was I sure that I wanted pictures in my new book, even those pleasing engravings of antique lovers on the sheet music: leave sunny imaginations hope. What we look like when we are old is not necessarily what we feel like, and we all look quite different from each other. None of the elderly couples on Carrol’s sheet music resemble the partners Jack and his wife might have become in old age.

  When Don and I got back home, there were silver threads among the golden grasses mounded on either side of the brick walkway: shiny silver filaments, making patterns like filigree with the gold. Amid the silver and the gold, some blades had turned wheat pale and brittle, thin hairs lifted by the winnowing wind and glistening from the moisture in the darkening air. “Make new friends, but keep the old; / one is silver and the other gold.” I may not foresee the heaven that Ames and old Boughton envision, but I share their belief in the grace of the grasses.

  Recounting the Ways

  BEFOREHAND, I COUNTED on my fingers: the number of suppers to be prepared, the number of settings to be laid, the number of beds to be made, the number of pounds of the bird we needed, which Don managed to lift and place in our shopping cart. On most evenings we would be six—my older daughter Molly, her husband Kieran, his brother Suneil, and Eli, now almost in double digits. Julie was setting off on a road trip, but several friends would attend the feast itself. How many bags of cranberries should we buy for the raw and the cooked sauces Don always prepared and the bread Molly always baked?

  With the refrigerator stuffed, I embarked on my late-life cooking preparations and went through half a box of tissues while reading Lila, whose conflicted heroine tells me how decidedly John Ames’s reticence (in an account meant for the future eyes of their child) had obscured his wife’s volatile character as well as their turbulent relationship. For in the sequel to Gilead (which is really a prequel), later-life lovers must contend with the aftershocks of trauma. Love that arrives late can come after great pain, as Shakespeare knew. Yet that pain may not arrest or numb but burn or blister a later-life lover, making her wince at the touch of the hand she wants to hold.

  Our abundant plenty underscored the privations of Marilynne Robinson’s thrown-away character. Written in the third person but from Lila’s perspective, the novel illuminates Lila’s meeting with John Ames, their marriage, her pregnancy, and maternity through interposed scenes from the decades preceding 1956: her being tossed out as a child, her rescue by a woman named Doll, laboring in the fields, losing Doll, a stint in a St. Louis whorehouse and hotel, then hitching rides that land her at a forsaken cabin just outside of Gilead. Even as Robinson moves back and forth between the present and past, she pointedly detaches old age from chronology. Lila was “old” and “had been old a long time,” for “all the youth had been worked out of her before it had really even set in.”

  Lila has lived through violent times. At four or five years of age, she was thrown out on a stoop, where Doll took her up and carried her in the rain to a cabin. There Doll “pinched off little pills of corn bread and put them in the child’s mouth, one after another” and then washed her down. Lila thought that “she had been born a second time.” Infested with nits, sometimes mute, Lila would keep her deliverance a secret because Doll could go to jail for stealing the child, arriving “like an angel in the wilderness.” When the little girl is given a name, it becomes clear that this opening scene is a secular baptism, in contrast to the religious baptism Lila would later ask for and receive from John Ames. That she yelled and cursed throughout it suggests that human, even humane, contact hurts.

  While I was finding pillows and pillowcases or preparing the meals Eli favored, I pondered the two objects Doll bestows on the child to whom she gives the greatest gift when she scoops her up and wills her to live: a knife and a shawl. After years spent bonded with Doll, working as a migrant with one year off in town for schooling, Lila manages to retain the knife that Doll had whetted until the blade “was sharp as a razor.” Like a snake’s, the knife’s nature is “to do harm if you trifled with it.” Lila’s need to have it at the ready represents her distrust. It shocks her that John Ames has been using it to pare apples. “All she had was that knife. And dread and loneliness and regret. That was her dowry.” Even after the birth of their son, Lila determines to keep the knife, since “he could want it sometime”—which means, she realizes, that she cannot abandon all the bitter thoughts of self-protection that, inherited from Doll, blunt her fears.

  The shawl that Doll wrapped around Lila they held onto “till it was worn soft as cobwebs.” But during one of their hard times, the leader of their migrant group “dangled it over the fire, and the flames climbed right up it toward his hand.” It was “so worn then, threads that stayed together somehow, you could see right through it,” and yet they had kept it “for the use they made of it, remembering together. There wasn’t much that felt worse than losing that shawl.” While the dust bowl scenes of Lila remind me of the fiction of John Steinbeck and Harriet Arnow, the shawl reminds me of Cynthia Ozick, who uses the same image to describe the frayed comfort available to a starving child in a concentration camp.

  As I cooked and made beds, I realized that I was handling a knife and a blanket that were somehow brought out of Germany: a serrated bread knife and a woolen blanket, which in one corner had the label “Susan Janet David.” When Don and I moved into the Inverness, I had a zany fantasy of bearing our son: his first name would be David. Only when the first of the cherished grandchildren arrived did I begin to feel us knitted together into the lives and loves of all four of the girls we share. My mother must have stitched on the nametag when I was sent to Girl Scouts camp for two weeks, an extravagant expenditure for the family.

  Like Lila, I had nits as a child, as well as worms, but the impoverishment was not connected to homelessness. Rather, it meant very long hours of parental work. My father laboring in a body and fender shop from six in the morning until six at night, grime beneath his fingernails and under his cuticles, no matter which brush he used to scrub them; my mother sewing gloves all day and after supper, very fine stitches around each of the leather fingers, with calluses on the palms of her hands.

  The many bedrooms of the Inverness strike me as vaguely obscene, though I am gladdened by the prospect of seeing the kids
and by the news that Suneil’s flights from London will land him at the airport around the time my daughter’s family should arrive from Boston; they could all drive down together. My son-in-law’s brother Suneil is a favorite of mine. A judiciously gentle soul, he must have known something about childhood wounds, I suspect.

  That Lila retains the sharpened knife, not the comforting shawl, speaks to the fear, loneliness, and defensiveness that envelop her. Cutting herself off from the “beautiful old man” whose presence brings her a sense of peace, she continually schemes to abandon John Ames, or hurts his feelings, or considers stealing their child and leaving him lonelier than he had ever been before. One can only guess how unnerving this stormy late-life relationship must have been for John Ames, though he is touched by Lila’s cultivating the roses on the graves of his long-dead wife and child.

  The scene of the Protestant christening, days after Lila proposed marriage to Ames, emphasizes the psychological consequence of Lila’s traumatic life: all the edginess triggered by having been unwanted, unnamed, without a family or even a birth date. By the river near the abandoned shack, Lila feels humiliated that she does not understand the words Ames uses, and is determined to leave Gilead on a bus. Ames fastens a locket of his mother’s around her neck and asks for reassurances. “I can’t see how it’s going to work,” she says: “What if it turns out I’m crazy?” Lila—mortified by her ignorance and by what John Ames does not know about her past—deems herself unlovable: “I’ve got shame like a habit, the only thing I feel except when I’m alone.” But what she says to him is “I can’t marry you. I can’t even stand up in front of them people and get baptized.” His pain, registered on his “reddened” face, issues in an offer to christen her right there and then, just the two of them, by the flopping catfish she had just caught.

  Only after the baptism does Lila confess, “I want you to marry me! I wish I didn’t. It’s just a misery for me.”

  “For me, too, as it happens.”

  “I can’t trust you!”

  “I guess that’s why I can’t trust you.”

  “Oh,” she said, “that’s a fact. I don’t trust nobody. I can’t stay nowhere. I can’t get a minute of rest.”

  Despite their subsequent marriage, despite her “creeping into the old man’s bed when he never even asked her to,” Lila continues to fantasize about leaving Ames or worries that he will abandon her. She even tries to unbaptize herself. In every way possible, she sets out to alienate the old man on whose shoulder she wants to place her weary head. “When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.”

  Is it only John Ames’s steadfast patience that enables their marriage to prosper or does Lila have resources of her own, I wondered. But the kids had arrived. In the whirlwind of reheating, serving, clearing, and cleaning leading up to and then including the feast, thoughts of Lila had to be stowed away, as they were during the meandering, late-night conversations, always the greatest pleasure of my older daughter’s visits.

  The apple did not fall far from the tree, I thought when I looked over at Molly during extended discussions of campus politics and institutional practices with her husband and his brother, though in every way she is better and brighter than I, more at home in the world. When a child, she was a gifted actress and singer. In Really Rosie, Imagine That, and a succession of musicals, she glowed in the spotlight. If there was friction between us, generally it resulted from headstrong impulses we shared. About campus politics, there was room for debate. While Eli slept upstairs and a fire blazed in the family room, we considered the protests against college buildings named for Lord Jeffrey Amherst, Woodrow Wilson, and John C. Calhoun. Does the changing of a name redeem history or, as I thought, erase and bowdlerize it? Molly felt it made students of color more comfortable in environments that could be disheartening.

  But on the deficits of public versus private institutions, we all agreed. The cheese ball at receptions hosted at Pittsburgh and Indiana contrasted with the sushi and fresh fruit circulated at MIT, where Molly and Kieran had just landed. We laughed at our chagrin back in 1990 when the starter salad at a ceremonial lunch in the Union—Don was receiving an award for service, I was promoted to the rank of distinguished professor—was followed by dessert.

  Would the straitened public universities, to which Don and I had dedicated our lives, be able to compete with well-endowed private ones? We planned Eli’s daytime activities and our remaining dinners together, Kieran’s curries and the English sweets Suneil had brought, before lamenting the miserable job market in the humanities for graduate students in private as well as public schools. We were astonished that Don had received several job offers through the mail—without any campus interviews—when he was finishing up his training at Ohio State back in the fifties.

  It was sad, Molly remarked upon leaving, that Fran had not made an appearance. Thinking about the inevitable leftovers, I remembered how famished Fran had been when she would arrive at my house for dinner, as she did frequently back when the girls were very young. Sometimes she would eat her supper and then finish what the kids left on their plates. It seemed to me that she had never had enough of anything: food, attention, affection, praise, privacy, time free from work. Maybe all my Sturm und Drang about the sick grandbaby and then about Don’s spring falls had been too upsetting, too confusing for her. Like the mice zapped in stress tests, who respond to painful stimuli by biting other mice, had I snapped? Perhaps she needed to protect herself. Or maybe she was dealing with other vexing issues unrelated to me. In the old days, it was pure joy to cook for her and then joy, too, when she turned the tables and fed me the very best spicy shrimp I have ever in my life been blessed to taste.

  Both in Gilead and in Lila, food is sacramental: a hallowed reward that creates a sense of devotion. When as a boy John Ames went into the wilderness with his father to find his grandfather’s grave, the woman who brought them a supper of cornmeal mush seemed “like a second mother.” The crumbs of bread Doll fed to little Lila initiate an education into how to get along: “You can eat the roots of things. Cattails. Wild carrot. Nettles are very good if you know how to pick them and cook them. Doll said you just had to know what wouldn’t kill you.” No wonder, then, that Lila wants to unbaptize herself: “If Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her, holding to the skirt of her dress.”

  Should I have taken Don’s advice and used the Trollope ploy on Fran’s letter? With so much history at stake, should I have willfully misinterpreted her letter, thanked her for responding, and proposed a meeting? During this holiday season, would she have the companionship of her other close friends or her family? I will write to send her my best wishes for a good new year, I determined, as I took to heart John Ames’s view that “it is seldom indeed that any wrong one suffers is not thoroughly foreshadowed by wrongs one has done.” Integrity leads him to add, “It has never been clear to me how much this realization helps when it comes to the practical difficulty of controlling anger.”

  John Ames does not judge but engages Lila’s questions about faith, which evolve out of her past deprivations and get to the core of his religion. Two problems persistently nag her. First, she worries that those unbaptized, like Doll, will not attain eternal life but will instead “have to answer” at the Last Judgment “for lives most of them never understood in the first place”: “Lila hated the thought of resurrection as much as she had ever hated anything. Better Doll should stay in her grave, if she had one. Better nothing the old men said should be true at all.”

  Lila also ponders the ancient problem of the suffering of the innocent: “if God really has all that power, why does He let children get treated so bad? Because they are sometimes. That’s true.” She is thinking of her own past, of another castaway child she tried to help, and of the meaning of a passage in Ezekiel that haunts her: about a baby thrown out—“No eye pitied thee”—to whom God says, “Though thou art in thy blood: live; yea, I said unto
thee, Though thou art in thy blood, live.” John Ames interprets the story figuratively, as an allegory about the Lord binding himself in marriage to Jerusalem. Wise about his limited comprehension, he does not presume to answer either of Lila’s theologically charged concerns. Instead, he does what I do when someone hurt comes to me: he blathers on.

  But Lila by herself has found through her reading a way of understanding her own situation. Like the baby in its blood, she had been told to live. Even though John Ames wishes she would read Matthew, Lila sticks with Ezekiel and Job because their accounts describe apocalyptic events comparable to those she has experienced. She studies biblical texts that reveal the wild ferocity of a natural world she had herself inhabited: “a storm wind . . . a great cloud, with a fire infolding itself,” she thinks, “could have been a prairie fire in a drought year.”

  “And out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures” teases Lila to consider the “likeness” of her own name and nature:

  She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of a life, because she was all alone in it. She lived in the likeness of a house, with walls and a roof and a door that kept nothing in and nothing out. And when Doll took her up and swept her away, she had felt a likeness of wings. She thought, Strange as all this is, there might be something to it.

  Puzzling over the most difficult texts in the Western tradition, Lila discovers descriptions evocative of her own experiences, but dazzlingly dissimilar as well. She finds a likeness.

  That Robinson’s character eases her grief by reading speaks to me of the importance of reading. In stories, we contemplate others like and unlike ourselves, confronting situations we might also face, but differently. As we consider creatures whose background and problems and values differ from our own, we identify and sympathize and see ourselves anew. Empathy for those who are not-us humanizes us. Whether or not it translates into compassionate behavior, it stretches the boundaries of our being. We each of us expand to contain multitudes.